As part of the American political system, advocacy organizations (e.g., the American Civil Liberties Union or the National Rifle Association), corporations, trade groups, unions, and other organizations (“Organizations”) try to influence the government to adopt certain policy positions. As part of this effort these Organizations often ask individual citizens who are members of, or sympathetic to, their Organization (“members”) to contact government Officials at the national, state, and local level, as well as their employees, agents, and advisors, (“Officials”) to express their support or opposition to a particular policy. These messages (“messages”) include but are not limited to emails, physical mail, video or audio recordings, and phone calls. Currently these Organizations often rely on emails to members to get those members to send messages to Officials, especially asking members to visit the Organization's website and fill out a web form that identifies the government Official of which the member is a constituent and provides the member with a draft email to send to their Official.
This system is flawed because it fails to consider that emails to members asking them to contact their Officials are often inconvenient for the member to act on, particularly if they are not near a personal computer they can use for that purpose. Under the current system, members often need to enter their personal information repeatedly, and have to navigate cumbersome web pages. The current system is also inapt to the current reality of widespread mobile device use, where members often access their emails via mobile devices that are ill suited to the non-mobile optimized web pages used by Organizations. The current system also fails to leverage other communication tools, including but not limited to social media (e.g., Facebook® (a registered trademark of Facebook, Inc.), Twitter® (a registered trademark of Twitter, Inc.), etc.) email, and other political media to allow members to alert their acquaintances of their political activity. In addition, the current system denies the member of an Organization a meaningful way to reject the Organization's request for action and provide constructive feedback to the Organization as to why the member declined to act or to seek additional information from the Organization before deciding whether to accept or reject a request.
Likewise, the current system is flawed from the Organizations' perspective because the Organizations are limited in the diversity of messages that they can put before their members to be sent to Officials, leading Officials to dismiss the large number of near identical messages as “astroturf.” Additionally, the current system denies Organizations a convenient way to determine which of their positions are popular or unpopular with their membership. The current system also fails to allow Organizations to target their members with real precision, either based on subject matter or relevant geography, resulting in many members getting emails asking them to act when their Officials, and therefore the members' action, are not relevant. This leads to desensitization on the part of members to Organizations' requests for action.
In view of the above shortcomings, there is a need for a new method of connecting Organizations to members and members to Officials.